Call it the mathematics of misery. A professor from the University of Connecticut claims that his numerical calculations predict years of turmoil and unrest for the world. A pioneer in a new field of math known as “cliodynamics,” Russia-born Peter Turchin — who’s in the university’s departments of ecology and evolutionary biology, anthropology and mathematics — told the Daily Mail that his calculations “treat history as just another science.” According to Turchin’s homepage, cliodynamics “uses the tools of complexity science and cultural evolution to study the dynamics of historical empires and modern nation-states.”

Staying with the professor’s line of thinking, the outlook for the near-future — arrived at through computer-driven modeling that takes in turns of events over past centuries — is downright combustible. “My model indicated that social instability and political violence would peak in the 2020s,” he told the Mail. “The presidential election which we have experienced, unfortunately, confirms this forecast. We seem to be well on track for the 2020s instability peak.”

“Unless something is done, instability will continue to rise”

- Peter Turchin

Adding credibility to his predictions, Turchin points out that he is not some egg-headed version of Nostradamus or Edgar Cayce. He does not predict specific events that will take place, but he does run numbers representing past events to prognosticate future trends. For example, Turchin could not have tea-leafed his way to calling the Trump presidency, but his work “did predict rising social and political instability. And, unless something is done, instability will continue to rise.”

Pushing all of it forward, the prof believes, will be “elite over-production,” with imbalances of wealth and the alienation of those who are less than well-off. On the upside, though, Turchin believes that the trend can be reversed by making cultural and political adjustments before the big descent hits. “Ours is the first society that can perceive how [the destructive] forces operate, even if dimly,” he said. “This means that we can avoid the worst — perhaps by switching to a less harrowing track, perhaps by redesigning the roller-coaster altogether.”